{"id":73288,"date":"2024-06-25T00:10:20","date_gmt":"2024-06-25T04:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=73288"},"modified":"2024-06-25T00:10:20","modified_gmt":"2024-06-25T04:10:20","slug":"the-science-of-beauty-how-aesthetics-can-boost-your-mood-and-cognition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/the-science-of-beauty-how-aesthetics-can-boost-your-mood-and-cognition\/","title":{"rendered":"The science of beauty: how aesthetics can boost your mood and cognition"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Your spacecraft is spiralling out of control, and you will hit planet Arakis unless you fire up the thermal after-boosters. Which of the two buttons below would help you fire up the boosters on time? Would you be more likely to survive if the cockpit designer had installed the button on the left or the right?<\/p>\n

\"\"

Spacecraft buttons. Irene Reppa\/International Organization for Standardization, CC BY-SA<\/p><\/div>\n

If you picked the left button, congratulations! Science suggests you might have just survived the crash landing. But what is it about these buttons that made you pick one button over the other?<\/p>\n

The short answer is beauty, with the button on the left being more aesthetically appealing than the one on the right \u2013 making us spot it quicker. That may seem surprising. But beauty is more important to us than we tend to realise. As the poet John Keats\u00a0put it<\/a>: \u201cBeauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know.\u201d<\/p>\n

How much we like something and how beautiful we find it, can have a compelling effect on our experience and behaviour. Research shows that when we see beautiful things \u2013 be it a person, a painting or a kettle \u2013 we attribute a whole host of positive affectations to them like\u00a0truth<\/a>,\u00a0innocence<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0efficiency<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Beauty emerges from different properties of the loved thing. Sure, though there is a certain degree of subjectivity in what we like \u2013 I may love something that you don\u2019t \u2013 but, when it comes to beauty, there are some well-established properties that matter.<\/p>\n

These include certain properties of the object itself, such as proportion, symmetry and curvature, as well as the relationship between the object and the viewer, including the degree of familiarity.<\/p>\n

For instance, we tend to like classic architecture such as the Parthenon, because of its alluring proportions (such as\u00a0the golden ratio<\/a>), and we tend to find paintings\u00a0of familiar motifs more beautiful<\/a>\u00a0than those of unfamiliar ones.<\/p>\n

A generally accepted principle accounting for what we like is the\u00a0processing fluency theory<\/a>: the easier it is to understand something, the more we like it.<\/p>\n

Aesthetics matter<\/strong><\/h4>\n

But why care about beauty? Why not take a utilitarian approach and embrace the functional above all things? Put simply: aesthetics matter, and it shows in our behaviour and performance.<\/p>\n

We surround ourselves with things we like, objects that are appealing to the eye. We visit art galleries and look at beautiful paintings. We surround ourselves with nice things at home.<\/p>\n

We also tend to persevere more with things we like. A case in point is mathematics, where an elegant and beautiful equation\u00a0is preferred over a clumsy one<\/a>. We tend to think that beautiful things will work better and be easier to learn and use. And sometimes we are correct \u2013 such as when we reach for a simple pencil sharpener because we think it will work better than a more cumbersome design.<\/p>\n

But aesthetics can also influence performance in tasks where efficiency \u2013 speed and accuracy \u2013 matters. Even when we\u2019re not aware of it. In my own research, my colleague and I asked participants in our lab\u00a0to find icons on a screen<\/a>. After controlling for several variables \u2013 such as complexity, meaningfulness, familiarity and concreteness \u2013 we found that participants spotted appealing icons faster than their less appealing counterparts.<\/p>\n

But this was only when the task was difficult. That is, when the icons were complex, abstract or unfamiliar, there was a clear advantage for the more aesthetically appealing targets. By contrast, when the icons were visually simple, concrete or familiar, aesthetic appeal no longer mattered \u2013 the task was easy enough already.<\/p>\n

In the figure at the top, both spaceship booster icons are complex, but the one on the left has greater aesthetic appeal \u2014 and that is why the left button would be the better one to put into your spaceship.<\/p>\n

Aesthetics can beat the blues<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Shops often carefully select music, objects and scents that can influence our buying behaviour.\u00a0In our recent study<\/a>, we showed how and why this works.<\/p>\n

We put participants in a positive or negative mood by listening to either a happy or sad piece of music and reading a list of statements. We then asked them to complete a timed search task. Previous research shows that negative moods can\u00a0negatively affect<\/a>\u00a0our performance.<\/p>\n

People in a positive mood found the appealing icons more easily than the unappealing icons. This benefit, however, also emerged for participants in a negative mood, but a little later. We concluded that the appealing stimuli must be inherently rewarding, with aesthetic appeal helping to overcome the detrimental effects of negative mood on performance \u2013 that is, appeal can beat the blues.<\/p>\n

It seems that being in a positive mood makes us more likely to engage with beautiful things. But even in a negative mood, appealing items are likely to capture attention and influence behaviour \u2013 as long as we remain exposed to them long enough.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s increasing evidence that small doses of psychedelics in a controlled environment such as a clinic\u00a0can help treat depression<\/a>. Such drugs typically produce\u00a0intense experiences of beauty<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 in terms of colours and shapes \u2013 and help us feel more at one with our surroundings.<\/p>\n

Small but significant effect<\/h2>\n

Aesthetic appeal can decrease a participant\u2019s response time by roughly one tenth of a second. This may seem small but can be quite significant: savings of even a few milliseconds at a time all add up when dealing with a bad wifi connection or a slow 3G signal on a smartphone.<\/p>\n

Visionary leaders and innovators have long had an intuitive grasp of the importance of aesthetic appeal and simplicity in industrial design \u2014 perhaps none more so than Apple\u2019s founder Steve Jobs, whose\u00a0commitments to aesthetics and simplicity<\/a>\u00a0were legendary.<\/p>\n

Sadly, it appears as though many designers did not follow Jobs\u2019 visionary intuition. Perhaps the accumulating data will finally convince them that design has an important impact on performance.<\/p>\n

The next time you\u2019re designing a disruptive mobile app, or even the control centre for your spacecraft, remember how important aesthetics and beauty are \u2014 it just might save your crash landing.<\/p>\n

Author Bio:<\/strong> Irene Reppa is Assistant Professor, Psychology at Swansea University<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Would you be more likely to survive if the cockpit designer had installed the button on the left or the […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[434996],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-73288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lifestyle","tag-aesthetics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe science of beauty: how aesthetics can boost your mood and cognition - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/the-science-of-beauty-how-aesthetics-can-boost-your-mood-and-cognition\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The science of beauty: how aesthetics can boost your mood and cognition - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Your spacecraft is spiralling out of control, and you will hit planet Arakis unless you fire up the thermal after-boosters. 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